under very exceptional neglect; but somewhat similar instances could have been produced in other parts of England.  A hundred years earlier, Ralph Thoresby, travelling in Yorkshire, had expressed his amazement that ’on the Lord’s Day we rode from church to church and found four towns without sermon or prayers.’[1065] This is scarcely the place to enter further into the degree of spiritual destitution which prevailed in many parts of England, and into the causes which brought it about.  It may be enough here to remark that the re-quickening of religious activity in the Church of England, mainly through the labours of clergy and laymen of the Evangelical school, came none too soon.

It should be added that, owing mainly to the thoroughly bad system of bundling three or four poor livings together, in order to provide respectable maintenance for a clergyman, it was very common in country places to have only one service on the Sunday.  Nothing could be more likely than this to promote laxity of attendance at divine worship.

Dean Sherlock, in a treatise upon religious assemblies published by him in 1681, remarked severely upon the unseemly behaviour which was constantly to be seen in church—­the looking about, the whispering, the talking, the laughing, the deliberate reclining for sleep.  Whether it had arisen out of contempt for all the externals of worship, or whether it were owing rather to a wild fear of any semblance of fanaticism or of hypocrisy, this rude and slovenly conduct had come, he said, to a great height, and brought great scandal upon our worship.  The essayists of Queen Anne’s reign made a steady and laudable effort to shame people out of these indecorous ways.  The ‘Spectator’ constantly recurs to the subject.  At one time it is the Starer who comes in for his reprobation.  The Starer posts himself upon a hassock, and from this point of eminence impertinently scrutinises the congregation, and puts the ladies to the blush.[1066] In another paper he represents an Indian chief describing his visit to a London church.  There is a tradition, the illustrious visitor says, that the building had been originally designed for devotion, but there was very little trace of this remaining.  Certainly there was a man in black, mounted above the rest, and uttering something with a good deal of vehemence.  But people were not listening; they were most of them bowing and curtseying to one another.[1067] Or a distinguished Dissenter came to church.  ’After the service was over, he declared he was very well satisfied with the little ceremony which was used towards God Almighty, but at the same time he feared he was not well bred enough to be a convert.’[1068]

Addison, however, and his fellow-writers, who might be abundantly quoted to a similar effect, succeeded in making their readers more sensible than they had been of the impropriety of all such conduct.  During the latter half of the century, the careless and undevout could no longer have ventured, without fear of censure, on the irreverent familiarities in church which they could have freely indulged in for the first twenty years of it.[1069]